Improvements to Onshape - August 20th, 2018

It’s the middle of August and while a lot of people may be on vacation we’ve been working on a large release for those still in their offices with us. As always, let us know what you think in the comments below.

CAD IMPROVEMENTS

CREATE A SKETCH FROM A MATE CONNECTOR

You can now define a sketch using a mate connector in addition to planes and planar faces. The advantage is the ability to define the sketch horizontal and vertical using the mate connector axes - which do not have to match the global orientation.

ADJUST ARROWHEAD SIZE IN ONSHAPE DRAWINGS

You can now adjust the arrowhead size and type in both the dimensions tab and annotations tab of the drawing properties panel.

AUTOMATIC INCREASE IN TESSELLATION QUALITY

In a previous update, users could set the tessellation quality of their models in Part Studios and Assemblies. Now in assemblies, as you zoom in on an object, your view will automatically use a finer tessellation if it exists. This will improve the initial performance of complex models without compromising the eventual display quality. Setting a specific tessellation quality is still available for each part.

USER NOTIFICATION PREFERENCES

Users now have more control over email and mobile notifications in Onshape. Under the account settings, you can now specifically manage when and how you are notified about actions that occur for sharing and commenting.

IMPORT FEATURE CHANGES

Onshape now defaults to importing parts with faults in the import dialog. After an import occurs you can edit the import feature and toggle the option to allow faulty parts. If there are faults in imported geometry, the error graphics will help reveal where a part is problematic.

DRAWING EXPORT IMPROVEMENTS

When exporting a drawing, you now have the options to remove bends and tangent lines, and choose to export spline data as splines instead of polylines. These options are available at the bottom of the drawing export dialog.

DRAWINGS TABLE PROPERTIES PANEL TAB

Drawings tables now have a tab in the properties panel to adjust line thickness, text height, text color, and more for both BOM tables and tables created in a drawing.

RENAME SELECTION SUPPORT FOR DRAWING VIEWS AND SHEETS

The hotkey 'Shift + N' to rename is now supported for drawing views and sheets.

SKETCH FILLET IMPROVEMENTS

Sketch fillets now better support applying a radius that is smaller than the default value. An indicator of where the current radius is located on the sketch will assist you to click and drag the radius to an appropriate value.

IN-CONTEXT INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS

The interface for editing in context now organizes multiple contexts and helps to avoid the creation of any unneeded contexts. The right-click menu is now organized based on the action you want to perform first, and then the choices for which context you would like to be affected.

REFERENCE PARAMETERS IN FEATURESCRIPT

Consuming Part Studio, imported CSV, and imported image data in custom features has been improved with the addition of Reference Parameters. Custom features can now prompt the user to select geometry from a Part Studio, CSV data from an imported file, or an image as input to the feature. You can use Reference Parameters to import sketch profiles to build your own custom library features or to import CSV data to build curves. This makes your custom features more flexible and universal and opens up an enormous amount of possibilities. The video shows Reference Parameters integrated into the Beams custom feature, referencing a standard library of 80/20 profiles.

STANDARD CONTENT ADDITIONS

We have added standard content for DIN bolts, screws, and nuts as well as sheet metal fasteners (NAS/PEM). Take a look at the list of added components below:

DIN Bolts screws and nuts

Hex set screw with half dog point and flat cone point DIN 564Hex set screw fine pitch with half dog point and flat cone point DIN 564Hex set screw with full dog point DIN 561Hex set screw fine pitch with full dog point DIN 561

PROFESSIONAL FEATURES

SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE SEAT APPLICATION PURCHASES

Companies in Onshape can now purchase multiple seats for an application within the App Store and allocate those purchased seats to users within the company. This makes all billing within Onshape centralized for each company. After buying an application for a specified number of users, an admin can go to the Application settings under the company settings and allocate which users can use the application. This is very similar to assigning users to a company's seats of Onshape licenses.

RELEASE HISTORY IMPROVEMENTS

Viewing the history of a release will now give more insight into automatic obsoletions. A new indicator will let you know when an automatic obsoletion occurs and viewing the obsoletion will reveal which part, drawing, or assembly triggered the workflow.

CREATE COMPANY TEAMS

Professional users will now be able to create company owned teams. The option to create a company team is under the company settings page.

APPROVERS NO LONGER REQUIRE EDIT PERMISSIONS

With this update, approvers are no longer required to have edit permission to the document (note - they still need to be a full-user). In many cases, engineers and designers are going to have their work reviewed for release by department leads, managers, and directors. Many of these users will probably just have view rights - this enhancement allows them to perform their work without additional permissions.

ENTERPRISE FEATURES

APPLICATION VISIBILITY IN ENTERPRISE

In the dev portal, developers for an Enterprise will now be able to specify that an application may only be used by their Enterprise. This is important for companies that are developing internal processes and custom applications within Onshape.

TRANSFER DATA OUTSIDE ENTERPRISE

With this update, you will now have the additional option to transfer documents and folders outside an enterprise. Admins will be able to right-click on documents and select the option to ‘Transfer Ownership’ to a recipient email address. The transfer of ownership is not complete until the recipient accepts the pending transfer. Pending transfers can be canceled at any time.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in Documents created before the date of this update.

Excellent work, guys! Reference parameters will completely change the way we develop our Feature Scripts from here on and make what was originally a tedious and complicated task easy, accessible, and simple.

In addition to the improvements above, we made some additional progress in sheet metal performance. Complicated models with many corners and reliefs will benefit most from this round of improvements. We hope this helps your workflow!

@SledDriver - doing automatic refinement in the part studio context currently necessitates performing re-tessellation, which is a costly operation that would interfere with modeling performance. We are aware that refinement in part studios is a desired enhancement, and are investigating solutions for it.

Reference Parameters in Featurescript: Hoping for someone to share their ANSI Standard Library where each profile type has the different sizes Configured (This is so any downstream features don't fail if the size of the profile is changed - i.e. 3x3 Tube changed to 4x4 etc... later in the design). I would love to take the time to do this, but have to spend time elsewhere now; maybe this week I don't need any sleep.

Create a Sketch from a Mate Connector: Love these expanded Connector additions as mentioned.

Sketch Fillet Improvements: Why not just have some intelligence to automatically change the default to something that makes sense and solves? Sure it take a fraction of a second to calculate in the sketch, but it would be more intuitive. Nice none-the-less.

I would like to make an addition to the "Import Feature Changes" section as I could have been more direct. If you import a model with faults and then go and edit the import feature in the feature tree, you should see the faulty areas of the part highlighted in red. This is only visible while editing the import feature. This should help to assist in repairing imported data or for you to make the decision to not include the faulty geometry by unchecking the box to allow faults.